I'm giving serious thought to doing a wipe-and-reinstall in hopes that it will un-fark my sound system. Some programs will not play sounds and I haven't yet divined why, but it might have been caused by rampant "remove this and add that" over the past couple years.

Thing is, if I'm taking that step anyway should I abandon Ubuntu and move to Mint? I really despise Unity even in 12.04 and KDE (also installed) doesn't really do it for me.

BobbinThreadbare wrote:Ok, so on my mom's laptop I put Ubuntu on there back in 2010. So she's running 10.04. Is there a way to upgrade directly from one LTS to another or do I have to go through the 4 versions in order?

BobbinThreadbare wrote:Ok, so on my mom's laptop I put Ubuntu on there back in 2010. So she's running 10.04. Is there a way to upgrade directly from one LTS to another or do I have to go through the 4 versions in order?

Great timing. I'm finally (as of last night) done with the homebrew competition "busy season" (I was on the organizing committees for two 700+ entry events), so maybe I'll even have a little time to take a look at this release.

Just had a "DOH!" moment. Downloaded and installed12.04, went to boot, and it just froze at a blinking cursor. Couldn't figure it out. Decided to reinstall again, and I noticed that it wanted to put the bootloader on my second hard drive instead of the first. Both hard drives are identical, 300 GB, same brand, same model. I always partition sda as 255GB dedicated to / and 4 GB as swap. sbd I always make the whole thing the /home partition.

Ugh! Nope, I'm switching back to Mint. Ubuntu's Unity just rubs me wrong in so many ways. First of all, they removed the feature that automatically hides the launcher panel when you maximize a window. That is the biggest pet-peeve I have, and it's big enough that I'm reinstalling Linux Mint 12. I honestly don't see any useful new features in Ubuntu 12.04. The sound control panel is weird, and they removed the hide-panel on maximize feature.(somebody should file this as a bug in the bug report, because it bugs a lot of people) And this last comment is probably because I'm already in a dissappointed mood, I don't like the color purple, or orange either. lol.

Mint v Ubuntu: I prefer Mint in pretty much all ways except for some reason it doesn't provide the same battery life as Ubuntu 12.04 on my HP dm1. I've updated the Mint 12 kernel to the same release as Ubuntu 12.04 and while that fixed the issue I had with my laptop's LED mute indicator, Ubuntu still manages to last roughly an hour longer. I've tried to track down any other differences but Powertop reports similar power usage levels and identical configurations.

Unity v GNOME3 v Mate v Cinnamon: Out of the four I believe GNOME3 is the least friendly, especially in the default configuration, with the extensions Mint provides it is better but still not enjoyable. By default it is an absolute nightmare if you're switching between multiple windows. Similarly Unity can also be a pain switching between windows, especially those of the same application. Mate is fine and classic, I have no real issues with it, I just simply prefer Cinnamon. Cinnamon would be excellent if it were more stable and I'm a bit confused why the developers didn't use the same menu panel design as Mate (the Mint Menu before all this DE mess started) and instead replaced it with a less functional version. It's not a big deal I just don't understand the decision.

Overall I'm not completely happy with the desktop environment situation in Linux. I have high hopes for Cinnamon though and I think they'll nail it at some point in the near future.

EDIT: Wanted to ask, those who are using Mint: Are you using the "standard" release or LMDE?

Last edited by Washer on Thu Apr 26, 2012 8:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I tried Ubuntu a few times and it just felt strange and bloated. I have a older latop where I run Debian 6 with xfce on a custom kernel - this is a 7 year old machine, the only upgrade being an SSD, and it can still boot in around 20 seconds and do most surfing and other office like tasks.

I'm happy that some little features are supported automatically installing in Hyper-V (like mouse support). It reduces the number of times I have to spend 40 seconds starting PuTTY & TightVNC. The keyboard shortcuts in GNOME 2 mapped easily in my head. I had a harder time being mouseless with Unity.

just brew it! wrote:The main problem with KDE is that it is stupendously bloated. I'm going to give it a try on 12.04 anyway though; hey RAM is cheap! But I suspect I may eventually end up on XFCE...

Yes well admittedly all my machines have at least 2GB of RAM these days, so I cant speak for lower memory requirements, but on modern machines it works fine. And more importantly, it works. And doesnt get in the way of getting things done.Anyway, here is a recent blog post from a developer about tips for reducing memory usage (he is using KDE on a netbook): http://shaforostoff.blogspot.ca/2012/04 ... emory.htmlI have not tried these myself, but thought the post might be useful to some.

I plan to give it a spin this weekend. I started building up a local mirror of the repository at work a few days prior to the official release, and will take a copy of that home on an external hard drive today. Local mirror FTW!

Washer wrote:By default it is an absolute nightmare if you're switching between multiple windows. Mate is fine and classic.

Overall I'm not completely happy with the desktop environment situation in Linux. I have high hopes for Cinnamon though and I think they'll nail it at some point in the near future.

EDIT: Wanted to ask, those who are using Mint: Are you using the "standard" release or LMDE?

GNOME3 has annoyed with with it's task switching too. I do like keyboard shortcuts, but task switching is horrible. Alt+Tab then down to switch between application windows; who thought that was a good idea? Then there is the virtual desktop situation...

You should try Xfce then. I've been using Xfce for a long time, and I've always been satisfied with it.

I've never understood why people are so high on GNOME. It's never been good, and I always get a sand in the underwear feeling when I use it.

When I ran Mint for a couple of months, I used the LMDE. I was getting tired of 6 month release cycles, and I was curious about Debian after being in the RedHat ecosystem for a long time.

@codedivineKDE leans heavily on the video drivers. If the video drivers aren't working well, you're experience will suffer.

Oh, they're scared of Apple! Riiight! They should be, because after this paranoid f-up in every UI department possible, the Apple products will be the only ones with GOOD and USABLE UI! But well, as they say, if you see a serious competition, start screwing things up, that really helps!

just brew it! wrote:I started building up a local mirror of the repository at work a few days prior to the official release, and will take a copy of that home on an external hard drive today. Local mirror FTW!

I upgraded last night. My server runs apt-mirror each night to sync with one of the other mirrors and so I get main, restricted and universe from the server - I don't bother mirroring multiverse. It took 1 minute to download the first 1670 packages from my local mirror and then 4 minutes to get the last 16 multiverse ones across the Internet. Even on my core i7 920 with 6GB of RAM and a Vertex 2 SSD, installation is far longer than download.

I want to run with it for a little while before I decide if they've made enough changes to Unity to make it usable.

I've got Kubuntu 12 installed here, for the simple reason that it was the only distro that I could manage to install with and that used the UEFI capabilities of the hardware I'm on. (Sabertooth 990FX, Phenom X6, SSD primary drive.) I had to boot with a CD. USB drives that supposedly had UEFI boot support never seemed to work for me. It's very possible that I was missing something, or just didn't understand how to access the UEFI boot possibilities of the flash drives. The UEFI boot option shows up plain as day with a CD.

Reading about other peoples experiences with booting the UEFI way has me wondering if it's just the m/b I'm on. I did update the "bios" to the latest available from ASUS. (3 months old aprox.)

Letting the installer make all the choices the first time I installed, I ended up with an improperly aligned partition scheme, and the swap on the SSD. Nothing at all on the rotating drive. :/ Reinstalled again, taking a little more time to set partitions by hand. I haven't checked out the installer that comes with the plain Ubuntu, but if you use a SSD or 'advanced format' hard drive and you let the installer have it's way, you may want to investigate the partition alignment of your install.

Reasonably happy with the Kubuntu. I have used KDE before and once I turn off most of the background sh**, I can live with it. To paraphrase the original developer of mutt who said "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."... All window managers suck, this one just sucks in a way I can work around without too much effort.